On October 6, 2014, the Supreme Court declined to hear seven cases in which federal courts of appeals had found bans on same-sex marriages to be unconstitutional. One month later, a divided court of appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in an opinion written by Judge Jeffrey Sutton, upheld the bans in Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee, & Kentucky. All four groups of plaintiffs have asked the Supreme Court to review that decision, and the Court is likely to decide whether to take up those cases at its conference on January 9, 2015. There are a number of legal issues in the case, but the keys to the ruling below are the two reasons Judge Sutton gave to support the ban, which this essay argues are indefensible under whatever degree of scrutiny the Court applies.

The majority opinion of Circuit Judge Jeffrey Sutton upholding bans in four states on same-sex marriage has an aura of reasonableness to it, but when it comes to offering real reasons to justify the bans, it cannot withstand analysis. According to Sutton, there are two reasons why the bans are constitutional: (1) they encourage procreation in marriage by opposite-sex couples, and (2) they uphold traditional marriage, while allowing for future change.

There are three undisputed facts that demonstrate conclusively that those reasons cannot sustain the bans: (1) most of the benefits of marriage for opposite-sex couples are unrelated to encouraging procreation; (2) the laws also preclude civil unions or any other arrangement that confers any of the benefits of marriage on same-sex couples; and (3) the Ohio ban was applied to deny the surviving member of a marriage performed out of state the right to include on the death certificate of his husband the indisputable fact that he was "married."

Moones Mellouli is a native of Tunisia, but a lawful permanent resident of the United States, engaged to marry a U.S. citizen. The federal government is trying to deport Mellouli for his Kansas conviction for possessing a sock – yes a sock! – deemed drug paraphernalia when used to conceal or store drugs. ACS thrives on its law-student participation, so let’s build a hypothetical with socks to illustrate this important Supreme Court argument. When a DOJ attorney steps to the podium at the Court on Jan. 14 to defend this deportation order, imagine for a moment his credibility if he walked up wearing two different colored socks; say a pink argyle and a green striped one.

But these socks would likely be hidden by the podium -- so imagine, instead, that he walked in on his hands to parade his mismatched stockings before the justices. Far-fetched perhaps, but the eyebrows this would raise should match the justices’ reaction to the government’s mismatched administrative interpretations of the single statute at issue here, Section 1227(a)(2)(B)(i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

First things first, this statute itself in no way calls for Mellouli’s deportation. It specifically calls for the removal of “any alien who at any time after admission has been convicted of a violation of . . . any law or regulation of a State . . . relating to a controlled substance (as defined in section 802 of Title 21).” But the record of Mellouli’s conviction does not disclose anything about the drug he had socked away. Kansas law bans plenty of substances -- a list far broader than those defined in section 802 of title 21. For example, salvia is on the Kansas list, a type of mint plant, which Miley Cyrus (another adventurous dresser) recently made news smoking.

The Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) is the administrative agency responsible for interpretation of this and other immigration statutes. Courts typically give administrative agencies a fair amount of leeway to interpret statutes. This principle is known as Chevron deference. But this deference is not free for the taking. Federal courts don’t give it when the agency interpretation bears little relation to the statute, and they throw deference completely to the side when the agency starts offering inconsistent interpretations of a single statute. The government is asking for Chevron deference in this case, but suffers from both of these problems.

The plain language of the federal statute requires the state paraphernalia conviction be directly and necessarily tied to a controlled substance under federal law. Keeping paraphernalia used with salvia and other Kansas-forbidden drugs may be criminal in Kansas, but these drugs are not on the federal list of controlled substances. There is no necessary federal tie Mellouli’s Kansas crime, and no basis for interpreting the statute otherwise.

The Supreme Court has been reluctant to jump into the question of same-sex marriage, preferring to let the issue percolate through state-by-state litigation in the lower federal courts. But the time has come for the justices to come out of hiding. The denial of marriage equality is a national problem, not a state-level problem, and it requires a national resolution that only our nation’s constitutional court can provide.

At the moment, 35 states allow marriage equality, while 15 forbid it. The anti-equality states not only refuse to allow same-sex marriages to be licensed and celebrated; 14 of them also refuse to recognize marriages from sister states where such unions are perfectly legal. Petitions from cases in four of those states – Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee – will be considered by the justices at their next private conference this coming Friday.

One reason marriage equality is a national issue is that our current patchwork of marriage laws imposes unreasonable, indeed absurd, burdens on same-sex couples’ security in their marriages and their freedom to move from state to state. A married gay couple from a pro-equality state can relocate for job, education or family reasons to an anti-equality state – as long as they’re willing to give up their marriage, and perhaps even their property and parental rights. A rational legal regime cannot tolerate this state of affairs.